Until last week, Burnaby homemaker Shelagh Dalrymple hadn’t even told her own children about her vision of Jesus.

The 51-year-old soccer mom worried she’d be considered part of the lunatic fringe if she informed people that Jesus had appeared to her, wearing a blue robe. When Dalrymple finally told her 13-year-old son, however, he didn’t laugh. He said her apparition sounded “cool.”

Still, Dalrymple is nervous talking to a reporter about the vision; she doesn’t want to appear spiritually arrogant, or act disrespectful of Jesus, whom she has considered her saviour ever since that shattering moment years ago when he suddenly appeared before her.

Dalrymple’s mystical secret is about to come out of the closet, however, because she is one of several British Columbians among the 30 North Americans who are studied in the just-published academic book, Visions of Jesus: Direct Encounters from the New Testament to Today.

Written by philosophy professor Phillip Wiebe, of B.C.’s Trinity Western University, Visions of Jesus is published by the prestigious University of Oxford Press. With its dense, even-handed tone, Visions of Jesus marks the first time that contemporary apparitions of Jesus have been studied for their psychological, neurological and metaphysical implications.

Although Dalrymple and many other shy people who recount their experiences in Visions of Jesus consider themselves everyday, unsaintly people, they end up in lofty company. Apparitions of Jesus are central to the two-billion-member Christian faith.

If the apostles hadn’t seen Jesus after his death, there would be no resurrection story. The church’s greatest mystics — Catherine of Sienna, Ignatius Loyola, Julian of Norwich — also reported having life-changing visions of Jesus.

Phillip Wiebe's book, Visions of Jesus

Dalrymple says her vision occurred in 1982 in a United Church in Nelson. Not particularly devout at the time, she nevertheless saw the figure of Jesus come out of the pastor’s doorway and walk to the podium, where he said to her, “Live by my commandments.”

The corporeal image stood about six metres away. His features looked Mediterranean. He was normal in size and had dark hair. Dalrymple can still vividly remember the sound his sandals made on the church floor. She had a feeling of both foreboding and overwhelming beauty.

No one else in the pews saw the vision. Dalrymple wondered if she was hallucinating. Months later, she would discover that she had conceived a child a week before the vision. The child was eventually born premature and died. She wonders if Jesus appeared to strengthen her. But she’s still not sure.

“I couldn’t imagine anyone less appropriate for the Lord to appear to,” Dalrymple says, sitting in the kitchen of her comfortable Burnaby home, where she lives with her two children and husband, Jim, a businessman who has a master’s theology degree from evangelical Regent College.

“I’m no saint. I’m not a wonderful person. I just do the best that I can. The whole thing is very humbling. All I know is there’s now no question who I’m going to meet when I depart this planet.”

The other 29 people who told Wiebe about having visions of Jesus include many evangelical Christians, as well as Catholics, Anglicans and some who had no church affiliation. Those studied include single mothers, prisoners, doctors, pastors, televangelists and stockbrokers.

In his book, Wiebe analyzes whether their apparitions could be hallucinations, dreams or supernatural occurrences.

Although Wiebe’s conclusions are open-ended, he strongly suggests visions of Jesus are authentic, possibly paranormal experiences, which should not be dismissed.

People who have apparitions of divine figures deserve to be taken seriously, he says, and their experiences warrant far deeper research.

Trinity Western University Professor Phillip Wiebe considers himself a Doubting Thomas.

Like the famous New Testament apostle, he refuses to believe Jesus Christ is divine unless he can prove it.

That’s why Wiebe has spent the past 20 years studying everything to do with the mysterious Shroud of Turin, which many believe is the bona fide burial cloth of Jesus.

But the philosophy professor at the Christian university in Langley had an experience this year with the shroud that not only convinced him Jesus was actually resurrected, but that the Virgin birth of Jesus — which Christians celebrate at Christmas — was for real.

The findings of Wiebe, who has become an internationally recognized expert on the shroud, will be detailed in a scholarly book he is working on for prestigious Oxford University Press, titled God and Other Spirits: Intimations of Transcendence in Christian Faith.

Wiebe describes himself as a skeptical Anglican. That’s why he was stunned by the feelings that overwhelmed him when, after decades of studying the shroud and other paranormal Christian phenomenon, he actually viewed the original four-metre cloth this year in Italy.

“I saw this thing, and I thought: Holy smokes! The resurrection is real. I was shocked at the confidence I felt. It made me realize I had had doubts about the resurrection,” Wiebe said Friday.

“And then I thought: If Jesus had such a strange ending to his life, maybe he had a remarkable beginning? Suddenly the difficulty of accepting the Virgin birth was overcome for me.”

Wiebe employs a different methodology for studying the Shroud of Turin, and the Virgin birth, than most researchers.

His approach grows out of the doubts he felt about Christianity as a young man after growing up in a Mennonite household in Manitoba, where he was pressured to blindly believe in Jesus’ resurrection and miraculous birth by a Virgin mother, Mary.

Wiebe went on to earn a secular PhD from Australia’s University of Adelaide, where he specialized in the arcane philosophy of confirming evidence. He became an epistemologist, one who studies the theory of knowledge and its validation.

He began devoting his career to probing claims of Christian miracles. Along the way, he wrote a respected 1997 academic book on everyday people, including British Columbians, who have had visions of Jesus.

Although some claim the Shroud of Turin, which bears the image of a man showing signs of crucifixion, is an elaborate hoax, Wiebe has concluded from his encyclopedic study of all the scientific tests of the shroud that it is physical evidence of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

“I really try to be honest about it. It’s absurd to take Christianity’s historical claims on faith. That’s crazy. I often say to my students, `If Christian claims aren’t true, I want to be the first to know,’ ” Wiebe said.

“Everything I ask about the shroud, and the Virgin birth for that matter, is very arduous. I’ve found no one piece of evidence to do with the shroud is decisive. But the cumulative effect is impressive. That is what turned my skepticism around.”

Even though the shroud had been venerated by Catholics as the burial cloth of Christ since at least 1357, the Vatican officially says only that it’s an important relic. Intrigue about the shroud has grown even more intense in the past century because the human image on the cloth was not fully revealed until 1898, when a photographer, in a darkroom, found that a negative revealed the thin face of a man with long hair, a mustache and a beard.

Since then, more than 30 different types of scientific analysis have been done on the shroud — by everyone from chemists to forensic pathologists, botanists to anthropologists.

Wiebe has thoroughly catalogued and compared all of them, presenting his findings this year at key shroud conferences around the globe. Since Wiebe has come to accept the shroud is almost surely authentic, he counts himself among those scholars who have serious questions about the validity of the 1988 carbon-dating tests that suggested it was created in the medieval era, not 2,000 years ago.

“I think the shroud is evidence of someone who disappeared and was brought back to life,” Wiebe said.

“And if it’s the case that Jesus disappeared in a cloud of subatomic particles, then he had a very strange ending that no one else in history had. That means Jesus really is God, or the manifestation of God. And such evidence of the resurrection for me sheds light on the Virgin birth.”

Is Wiebe, after he’s finished with the shroud, going to turn his formidable research and epistemological skills to proving the authenticity of the virgin birth?

“I don’t know if I’d have anything new to add,” he said with a laugh. “The Virgin birth is a much more difficult claim to study, because it’s all anecdotal.”

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